Where and when. Rug hooking as it is now practised developed along the eastern seaboard of North America in the nineteenth century — New England, the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador, and French Quebec — with most authorities putting the earliest hooked rugs around 1840.

It ran on free materials. Jute burlap reached Europe from India around 1820 and arrived in North American households as grain and feed sacking. Washed, stretched and sometimes pieced together, those sacks became the backing; worn-out clothing became the strips; hooks were made from bent nails, forks and wire. Early rugs were also hooked on linen, which is closer woven. Hooked rugs were called the craft of the poor, and that is straightforwardly what they were — floor coverings made by people who could not buy the machine-woven carpets being imported from England.

Old burlap tells on itself. Nineteenth-century backing is coarse and uneven, and printed sack branding often shows through on the reverse. It is one of the ways a genuinely old hooked rug is distinguished from a later revival piece — the evidence of poverty is now the evidence of authenticity, which is a strange turn for an object to take.

Why loops and not knots. A knotted pile rug is far more durable and takes many times longer. Hooking is fast, needs one simple tool, requires no loom, and can be picked up and put down between other work. It trades longevity for accessibility — and enough of the rugs survived anyway that museums now collect them as folk art.

The revival changed what it is for. From the early twentieth century, rug hooking was taken up as a craft rather than a necessity, with commercial patterns, dyed wool sold by the yard, and cut strips of standardised width. The technique is unchanged. What changed is that the materials stopped being free — which is worth noticing, because it is the same arc that runs through nearly every craft that started as thrift.

Tufting

Blueprints (2)

Rug Hooking

Punch Needle Tufting